The following article appeared in the Journal of Higher Criticism,
Fall 1997, published by the Institute for Higher Critical Studies based at Drew
University in Madison, New Jersey (see Recommended Link at end of Home Page). It
was written at the request of the editors, Darrell J. Doughty and Robert M.
Price.

*

THE JESUS PUZZLE
Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins

by Earl Doherty

Part One -
PIECES IN THE PUZZLE

That Jesus
was a man who lived and preached in Palestine during the early first century,
who gave rise to a faith movement centered upon himself which would go on to
become one of the world’s great religions, might seem to be a fairly
straightforward proposition. The idea lies at the base of nearly 2000 years of
Christian belief and remains the starting point for almost all scholarly study
of Christian origins. And yet, accommodating such a simple assumption to the
documentary evidence is an exceedingly difficult task, a puzzle whose solution
has proven stubbornly, perplexingly, maddeningly elusive.

If we could reduce the complexity
of the evidence to a number of identifiable elements, including the wider
setting of the times in which Christianity arose, we might come up with a list
of ten puzzle pieces:

Piece No. 1: A Conspiracy of
Silence

In the first half century of
Christian correspondence, including letters attributed to Paul and other
epistles under names like Peter, James and John, the Gospel story cannot be
found. When these writers speak of their divine Christ, echoes of Jesus of
Nazareth are virtually inaudible, including details of a life and ministry, the
circumstances of his death, the attribution of any teachings to him. God himself
is often identified as the source of Christian ethics. No one speaks of miracles
performed by Jesus, his apocalyptic predictions, his views on any of the great
issues of the time. The very fact that he preached in person is never mentioned,
his appointment of apostles or his directive to carry the message to the nations
of the world is never appealed to. No one looks back to Jesus’ life and ministry
as the genesis of the Christian movement, or as the pivot point of salvation
history. The great characters of the Jesus story, Mary his mother, Joseph his
father, John his herald, Judas his betrayer, Pilate his executioner: none of
them receive a mention in all the Christian correspondence of the first century.
As for holy places, there are none to be found, for not a single epistle writer
breathes a word about any of the sites of Jesus’ career, not even Calvary where
he died for the world’s sins, or the empty tomb where he rose from the dead to
guarantee a universal resurrection.

The one clear placement of Christ
in recent times, the accusation in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 that Jews in Judea
had killed the Lord Jesus, has been rejected as an interpolation by most of
today’s liberal scholars,1 while the one Gospel
episode Paul seems to allude to, Jesus’ words over the bread and wine at what he
calls "the Lord’s Supper" in 1 Corinthians 11:23f, can be interpreted as a
mythical scene Paul has himself developed through perceived revelation (see
Piece No. 5). Otherwise, no non-Gospel writer of the first century makes any
statement which would link the divine spiritual Son and Christ they all worship
and look to for salvation, with a man who had recently walked the sands of
Palestine, taught and prophecied and performed miracles, a man executed by
Pontius Pilate on Good Friday outside Jerusalem, to rise from a nearby tomb on
Easter Sunday morning. This "conspiracy of silence" is as pervasive as it is
astonishing.
[See Part One: A Conspiracy of Silence
in the Main Articles.]

The Gospel Jesus and his story is
equally missing from the non-Christian record of the time. Philo of Alexandria,
the Jewish historian Justus of Tiberias, Pliny the Elder as collector of reputed
natural phenomena, early Roman satirists and philosophers: all are silent. Pliny
the Younger, in his letter to Trajan from Bithynia c.112, does not speak of
Christ in historical terms. Josephus’ famous passage in Antiquities 18 is
acknowledged to be, as it stands, a Christian interpolation, and arguments that
an original reference to Jesus either stood there or can be distilled from the
present one, founder on the universal silence about such a reference on the part
of Christian commentators until the 4th century.2 As
for the reference in Antiquities
20 to James as "brother of Jesus, the one called (the) Christ", this passage
also bears the marks of Christian interference.3
The phrase originally used by Josephus may have been the same designation which
Paul gives to James (Galatians 1:19), namely "brother of the Lord," which would
have referred not to a sibling relationship with Jesus, but to James’ position
in the Jerusalem brotherhood, something which was probably widely known. A
Christian copyist could later have altered the phrase (under the influence of
Matthew 1:16) to render it more "historical" after Jesus of Nazareth was
developed. [For a complete examination (and partial rethinking) of the
Josephus question, see Supplementary Article No 10:
Josephus Unbound: Reopening the Josephus Question.]

The Roman historian Tacitus (Annals
15:44), is the first pagan writer to speak of Jesus as a man crucified by
Pilate. Rather than representing information he dug out of an archive (the
Romans would hardly have kept a record of the countless crucifixions around the
empire going back a century), this was probably derived from Christian hearsay
about a human founder of the movement, newly circulating in the Rome of Tacitus’
day (c.115). On the other hand, there are those who question the authenticity of
this passage as well. Around the same time, Suetonius’ report (Claudius,
25) about Jews in Rome agitating under "Chrestus" in the reign of Claudius is so
brief and uncertain, it may not be about Christ and Christians at all. In any
case, it would not witness to an historical Jesus.

As for the references to Jesus in
the Jewish Talmud: even though some remarks are attributed to rabbis who
flourished around the end of the first century (none earlier), they were not
written down before the third century, and thus are unreliable. In any case,
they are so cryptic and off the mark, they can scarcely be identified with the
Gospel figure.

[For the non-Christian witness to Jesus, see
Postscript in the Main Articles.]

Piece No. 2: A Transcendent
Christ and a Missing Equation

When early writers like Paul speak
of their "Christ Jesus", they do so in exclusively mythological terms. He is the
divine Son in heaven, speaking through scripture, connected to the believer in
mystical ways. Christ Jesus is the very substance of Godhead, pre-existent and
the image of the Father. Through him God effected creation, and his sustaining
power holds the universe together. Christ is also the cosmic redeemer who
descended from heaven to undergo a sacrificial death (an earthly time and place
is never stated) and was subsequently exalted and enthroned by God’s side.
Through this saving drama, Christ has subjugated the demon spirits of the air
who harass humanity, he has brought the souls of the dead righteous out of
Shoel, he has been given kingship over all supernatural and earthly powers, and
he has reconciled an estranged universe to God. He has also been given divine
titles formerly reserved for God.

Heady stuff. And all within two
decades or less of the presumed man’s life, a life which has apparently
disappeared from the minds of those early believers in the cosmic Son, since
they provide no mention of it, nor make any connection between the two. For all
that Paul and others have to say about faith, no one ever raises the need to
have faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah. The very
equation: "The divine, spiritual Son = Jesus of Nazareth, recently on earth," is
universally missing.

Even the death of Christ is
presented in mythical terms. Passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:13 ("We believe
Jesus died and rose again"), and the apparent designation of scripture as the
source of Paul’s doctrine that Christ died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15:3),
suggest that Christ’s death was an article of faith, not a remembered historical
event. The same is true, of course, for the resurrection. Paul never places
Jesus’ death in an historical setting (he never even tells us that Christ was
tried), and in 1 Corinthians 2:8 he assigns responsibility for the
crucifixion to the "rulers of this age" who unwittingly crucified "the Lord of
glory" and thereby ensured their own destined destruction.

While the meaning of the phrase
"rulers of this age" has been much debated, weight of opinion4
has come down on the side of the demon powers who were thought to inhabit the
lower celestial spheres and were responsible for the evils of the world and its
separation from God. This interpretation is supported by references to the
demonic powers in relation to Christ’s work in Colossians 2:15 and Ephesians
3:10; and by chapter 9 of the Ascension of Isaiah, which describes the descent
of the Son through the heavenly spheres and declares that he shall be hung upon
a tree "by the god of that world," meaning Satan and his angels of the
firmament. They, too, do not know who he is (9:13,15). [See Supplementary
Article No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus?]

2 Timothy 1:9 is another passage
which alludes to an upper-world, beyond-time setting for the redeeming act:
"God’s grace was given to us in Christ Jesus pro chronon aionion—before
the beginning of time..." Knowledge of it has only now been brought to light by
the revelation of the savior Jesus Christ (verse 10). The meaning of that Greek
phrase is another much-debated item,5
but it would seem to be an attempt to convey that Christ’s redeeming act took
place outside the normal boundaries of time and space, in an upper Platonic
realm of God.

How do Paul and other apostles
like himself know of their Son and Redeemer? Is it through the words and deeds
of Jesus on earth? Through traditions about him going back to those who had
witnessed his ministry? No, Paul has learned of the Son through revelation and
scripture. "God chose to reveal his Son through me," he says in Galatians 1:16.
The writer of Ephesians, in 3:4-5, gives us the main elements of the new
revelatory drama: "The mystery about Christ, which in former generations was not
revealed to men, is now disclosed to dedicated apostles and prophets through the
Spirit." Paul points to scripture (Romans 1:2, 1 Corinthians 15:3-4) as the
source of his gospel, his knowledge about Christ and his saving work. It is God,
through the Spirit, who has supplied this gospel, God who has appointed apostles
like Paul to carry the message. All of it is couched in revelatory language,
with words like phaneroo, apokalupto, epiphaneia.

The existence and role of the
divine Son has hitherto been unknown. He has been a secret, a "mystery" hidden
for long ages with God in heaven, now revealed together with the benefits of his
saving act. This is what Paul and the other epistle writers are constantly
telling us: in Romans 3:21f, 16:25-27, Colossians 1:26 and 2:2, 1 Peter 1:20.
They trace nothing back to a human Jesus and indeed, as in Titus 1:2-3, often
leave no room for such a figure in their picture of the beginnings of the
Christian movement.

Instead, they speak of Christ as
now present on earth (e.g., 1 John 5:20), sent by God as he has also sent
the Spirit. (The Spirit and the Son are sometimes linked, as in Romans 8:9,
Galatians 4:6, Phil. 1:19.) As the Pauline letters convey through the use of
their ubiquitous phrase "in—or through—Christ" (e.g., Romans 6:11, Ephesians
1:4, Titus 3:6), Christ is a spiritual medium through which God is revealing
himself and doing his work in the world. He is a mystical force, part of and
interacting with his believers, and he is God’s agent of salvation. All this
lies plainly on the pages of the New Testament epistles, while beside it stands
a void on the Gospel Jesus.

When we examine the mythological
features supposedly conferred upon an historical Jesus so soon after his
passing, we find that they all have their roots in contemporary religious
philosophy. The developing concept that an increasingly transcendent God
required an intermediary in order to have contact with the base world of matter
had led to the invention of secondary divine forces in both Greek and Jewish
thinking. For the Greeks, as well as philosophers of Hellenistic Judaism like
Philo, the Logos (largely an abstract concept) became the Platonic intermediary
who was the image of God, the force which had produced creation, and a continual
channel of spiritual communion between Deity and humanity.6
All these properties are present in the early Christian view of the spiritual
Christ.

In Jewish thinking, the figure of
personified Wisdom was envisioned as an emanation of God, his communicating
aspect and one who brought knowledge of him and his will to humanity. She
developed her own myths about coming to the world and inviting men and women to
learn from her (as in Proverbs, Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon). She eventually
became very Logos-like, described as God’s agent of creation and the divine
power that pervades and sustains all things (Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-30). She was
God’s throne-partner and his very image.

These features, too, are part of
the language about Christ used by Paul and his contemporaries. Christ sits at
the right hand of God, it was through him that "all things came to be and we
through him," (1 Corinthians 8:6); he too sustains the universe by his word of
power (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15f). Like the Logos and Sophia (Wisdom), only
the Son "knows" the Father, and humanity can only know God through the Son.

The most popular expression of
religious faith during the era which saw the rise of Christianity was not the
official state religion of "Olympian" gods, but the salvation cults known as the
"mystery religions". Each of these had its savior god or goddess, such as
Mithras, Dionysos, Attis, Isis, Osiris. Most of these cults possessed myths in
which the savior deity had overcome death in some way (not necessarily raised
from it), or performed some act whose effects guaranteed for the initiates good
fortune in this world and a happy existence in the next. Their rituals included
communal sacred meals, often involving such things as bread and wine and bearing
strong resemblance to Christian sacramentalism (Paul’s Lord’s Supper myth may
well have been influenced by Mithraic counterparts), and the mystical
relationships between initiate and deity are very similar to those expounded by
Paul in his branch of Christian belief. While Christianity and the pagan cults
interacted on one another as time went on, both can be regarded as more or less
independent branches of the same broad, ancient-world tree. [For the
mysteries, see Part Two: Who Was Christ Jesus? and
Supplementary Article No. 6: The Source of Paul's Gospel:
Learning of a Sacred Meal, and Response to Miles.]

In the period around the turn of
the era, Platonism divided the universe into a timeless, perfect higher realm
(containing the "genuine" reality, accessible to the intellect), and an
imperfect, transient world of matter as its copy. The mythical activity of the
cultic gods was thought to take place in this upper dimension of reality, having
effects on humanity below. (Such Platonic-style thinking tended to supplant
older views of myth which regarded this activity of gods as having occurred in a
primordial, sacred past.) This was combined with other, more popular views which
saw the universe as multi-layered, from the world of base matter where humans
lived, to the highest level of pure spirit where the ultimate God dwelled. The
layers between (usually seven, plus the air or "firmament" between earth and
moon) were populated by various sorts of angels, spirits and demons. The latter,
responsible for the evils that afflicted mankind and in the Jewish mind
associated with Satan, filled the lowest spirit layer and were regarded as part
of the realm of "flesh",7 cutting off earth from
heaven.

To perform their salvific work,
the savior gods descended into the lower reaches of the spiritual world, taking
on increasing resemblance to lower and material forms: Attis, for example (so
Julian the "Apostate" relates in Orations V), to the level just above the
moon; Christ, so Paul indicates in 1 Corinthians 2:8, along with the writer of
the Ascension of Isaiah 9, to the sphere of Satan and his powers in the
firmament. Here Christ, having assumed the "likeness" of flesh and a man
(Ascension 9:13 and Philippians 2:7-8), was crucified. As passages like
Ephesians 6:12 indicate, a cosmic battle was going on for control of the world,
between the forces of darkness headed by Satan, and the forces of good directed
by God. Christ was God’s agent, his Messiah, in this struggle. The crucifixion
was regarded as a decisive move in the cosmic battle with the demons, wherein
Christ subjected these spirits to himself and restored the unity of the universe
(Ephesians 1:10). [See Supplementary Article No. 3:
Who Crucified Jesus?]

More sophisticated philosophers
like Plutarch and Sallustius regarded the stories of the Greek salvation cults
as allegorical interpretations only, "eternal meanings clothed in myth."
Sallustius, writing in the 4th century, speaks of the story of Attis as "an
eternal cosmic process, not an isolated event of the past" (On Gods and the
World, 9). Paul, while he shows no sign of regarding the myth and suffering
of Jesus in anything but literal terms, would have been quite capable of placing
such redeeming activity in this upper, spiritual realm, and indeed his language
shows every sign of such an interpretation.

The story of Jesus of Nazareth is,
for the first hundred years of Christianity, to be found only in the Gospels.
Moreover, each of the Gospels is dependent for that story on the first one
written, "Mark". That Matthew and Luke are reworkings of Mark with extra, mostly
teaching, material added, is now almost universally accepted. Opinion is split
as to whether the narrative elements of John are derived from some Synoptic
source as well. But since the Fourth Gospel, despite some considerable revamping
to fit John’s own theology, gives us no fundamentally different material in its
narrative of Jesus’ life from that of the Synoptics, it is likely that it too
goes back ultimately to the first Gospel for its picture of the "historical
Jesus." (The so-called Discourses and distinctive Johannine Christology may well
be the earliest layer of tradition, originally applied to a spiritual Revealer
Son, upon which the "historical" Synoptic-derived biography has been overlaid.)
We thus have a Christian movement spanning half the empire and a full century of
existence which nevertheless has managed to produce only one version of the
events that are supposed to lie at its inception.

Modern scholars often refer to the
common teaching and anecdotal material extracted from Matthew and Luke, now
known by the designation "Q", as a "Gospel", though it is not a narrative work,
nor organized according to any other fashion than the traditional sayings
collection. But their confident claim that the material of this lost document,
or at least the earliest stratum of it, can be traced back to an historical
Jesus and thus constitutes an independent witness to him is not warranted, as I
will try to demonstrate in Part Three [of this article].

Acts, too, as an historical
witness to Jesus or the beginnings of the Christian movement, cannot be relied
upon. The more recent tendency is to see Acts as a second century product,
probably of Roman provenance, highly tendentious and written for the purpose of
creating a picture of Christian origins traceable to a unified body of apostles
in Jerusalem who were followers of an historical Jesus. Much of it is sheer
fabrication, and highly incompatible with information found in the letters of
Paul. There is no attestion for Acts prior to the 170s.

The dating of the Gospels is
partly to be determined by their attestion in the wider Christian writings. Here
we run into an astonishing state of affairs, for there is no clear sign of them
before the middle of the second century. No surviving writer before Justin makes
use of narrative documents containing words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, and
more often than not Justin’s quotations do not fit our canonical texts,
indicating that such works were still in the process of development, not to be
finalized until some time later.

Earlier allusions to teachings or
anecdotes resembling those of the Gospels seem not to be from written works, but
probably reflect developing traditions which themselves found their way into the
written Gospels.8 And Papias’ reference (around
120-130?, as reported by Eusebius) to documents attributed to "Matthew" and
"Mark" cannot be reconciled with the narrative Gospels which now go by those
names, names which were still unknown to Justin as belonging to his "memoirs of
the Apostles". Moreover, these were documents which Papias himself had not seen,9
but had learned about from another, making the whole report a distant third
hand.

Thus, when scholars regularly date
the Gospels between 65 and 100, they present us with a scenario in which the
story of Jesus’ life as told by the evangelists remains in a limbo and fails to
register on the wider Christian consciousness for almost a hundred years after
it was first committed to paper. A generally later dating would seem to be
required, perhaps with Mark in its initial version coming no earlier than the
year 90. (The standard dating based on Mark 13 is not necessarily valid, since
apocalyptic expectations continued until at least the end of the century, and
Jesus’ suggestion in 13:7 is that some time must pass after the Jewish War
before the End-time arrives.)

When the content of the Gospels is
examined, two fundamental characteristics emerge to cast serious doubt on the
historicity of their story of Jesus.

One is their incompatible nature.
The irreconcilability of such things as the baptism and nativity stories, the
finding of the empty tomb and Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, is, of
course, universally recognized, but the myriad other contradictions and
disagreements in the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds are more than simple
divergences in eyewitness testimony or imperfections in transmission. Since at
least the middle of this century, scholars have recognized that the
non-agreement between the evangelists, or between an evangelist and his sources,
is editorial, deliberate. That is, these writers were consciously redacting
their received material according to their own beliefs and purposes, while many
Gospel elements are recognized to be the evangelists’ own creation. It follows
that, if even the purported words of the Lord could be arbitrarily changed or
invented for tendentious reasons, there could be no thought of preserving
"history". These writers obviously looked upon their stories as artificial
products, designed for the needs of their own communities. Such insights have
led the last two generations of scholars (and more) to label the Gospels "faith
documents", not historical accounts.

The second characteristic is the
dependence of so many elements of the Jesus story on passages and motifs from
the Jewish scriptures. The Passion story is a veritable pastiche of verses from
the Psalms, Isaiah and various other prophets. Overall, it represents the new
telling of a tale found repeatedly throughout the Hebrew bible and related
writings. Scholars call it The Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent
Righteous One. The story of Jesus’ fate follows in virtual lockstep this age-old
pattern, its details culled from scriptural passages. No history in view here.

This process of mining the
scriptures was a reflection of a traditional Jewish practice known as "midrash",
in which the writer interpreted and enlarged upon individual or combinations of
passages from the bible to draw out new meanings and relevance, to offer a new
truth for contemporary times. One midrashic method was to refashion an existing
biblical narrative in a new setting. Thus Jesus was portrayed as a new Moses,
with features which paralleled the stories of Moses.

John Shelby Spong (in his
Liberating the Gospels) regards the Synoptic Gospels as midrashic fiction
in virtually every detail, though he believes it was based on an historical man.
Spong, building on earlier research by Michael D. Goulder,10
has argued that the Gospel story was designed to provide suitable lectionary
material for year-round Christian observances, based on the traditional cycle of
Jewish Sabbath and festival themes. This would entirely remove from the Gospels
any semblance of history.[See the book review of Spong's
Liberating the Gospels.]

If Christianity is to be regarded
as a single movement, then it is a wildly schizophrenic one. The variety and
scale of response to one man defies explanation. The "cultic" expression,
epitomized by Paul, apparently abandoned all interest in the earthly life and
identity of Jesus and turned him into a cosmic Christ who created the world and
redeemed it by his death and resurrection. Individual communities like those
responsible for the Q document and the Gospel of Thomas, ignored that death and
resurrection and present a teaching Jesus, a preacher of the coming Kingdom of
God. In what is probably the earliest stratum of material in the Gospel of John,
Jesus is a type of "descending-ascending" redeemer from heaven who saves by
being God’s revealer (though he reveals nothing about him except that Jesus is
his Son and representative); later, John equates Jesus with the Greek Logos. In
the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus is the heavenly High Priest who offers his
sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary, an expression of Alexandrian-style Platonism.
In the Didache, Jesus is reduced to a non-suffering intermediary servant/child
of God. He is presumed to lie behind the Wisdom-Word-Son mysticism of the Odes
of Solomon. In the diverse strands of Gnosticism, Jesus (or Christ) is a
mythical part of the heavenly pleroma of Godhead, sometimes a revealer akin to
John’s, sometimes surfacing under other names like Derdekeas or the Third
Illuminator.11
How many other forms of "Jesus" did not survive in extant documents is
impossible to tell, though Paul in his letters hints at divergent groups and
apostles all over the place, who "preach another Jesus" so different from his
own that he can lay curses upon them and accuse them of being agents of Satan.

Scholars like Burton Mack12
think to find behind the Gospels and other documents all sorts of little groups
preserving and formulating this or that type of tradition about Jesus and
viewing him in different ways. The Jesus extracted from Q and assigned to a Q
community is only the most prominent of these. All this fragmentation of an
historical man, the breakup of Jesus into a multitude of component parts, is an
unprecedented phenomenon, and not only does no document exist which embodies
such a process or even gives a clue as to why it took place, each of these
component parts seems blissfully unaware of the others. Paul’s letters give no
hint that there were communities centered around the very elements of Jesus’
life and preaching which he had abandoned as of no interest. On the other hand,
communities like that of Q seem impervious to the cosmic dimensions which the
cultic circles have bestowed upon their preacher of the Kingdom. Only the
evangelists (which is to say, the first of them, Mark) thought to bring these
disparate elements together. The question is, where did all the various elements
come from, and were they associated with a human Jesus in their pre-Gospel
stages?

If the historical Jesus seems
unknown to all in the first century but the early evangelists (and, in a
different sense, the later redactors of Q), the first stirrings of a "knowledge"
of an historical Jesus emerge soon after the second century gets under way.
Ignatius in his letters (by tradition written around 107 while on his way to
martyrdom in Rome) offers the earliest non-Gospel reference to Jesus as a man
born of Mary at the time of Herod and crucified by Pontius Pilate. Shortly
after, Tacitus’ reference appears, the first in non-Christian literature
identifying Jesus as an historical man who was executed at the time of Pilate.
Polycarp (writing about 130?), reflects the same outlook as Ignatius, and the
Epistle of Barnabas (c. 120?) seems to regard Jesus as an historical man, but
the writer is still dependent on scripture for much of what he assigns to this
figure. If Eusebius is to be relied upon, Papias too reflects a belief in an
historical Jesus (in Asia Minor), and he witnesses (at second hand) to some
circulating collections of sayings and possibly anecdotes that have become
associated with this figure.

And yet, there are major Christian
writings of the second century which fail to present an historical Jesus. Both
the Didache (which may have roots in the late first century) and the monumental
Shepherd of Hermas are devoid of any such figure; the latter never utters the
name Jesus. Even the New Testament epistles generally dated in the early second
century, 2 Peter and the three Pastorals, seem to lack an historical man. (The
sole reference to Pilate in the New Testament epistles, 1 Timothy 6:13, has been
examined with some suspicion by certain commentators13,
since it doesn’t seem to fit the context well. I regard it, along with 1
Thessalonians 2:15-16, as an interpolation.)

Most astonishingly, all the major
apologists before the year 180, with the sole exception of Justin (and a minor
apologist from Syria, Aristides), fail to include an historical Jesus in their
defences of Christianity to the pagans. This includes Tatian in his pre-Diatessaron
days. Instead, the apologists bear witness to a Christian movement which is
grounded in Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism, preaching the worship
of the monotheistic Jewish God and a Logos-type Son; the latter is a force
active in the world who serves as revealer and intermediary between God and
humanity. Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, Tatian in his Apology,
Minucius Felix in Rome (or North Africa) offer no beliefs in an historical
figure crucified as an atoning act, nor in a resurrection. (Nor do they have
anything in common with Paul.) In not one of them does the name Jesus appear,
and none speak of an incarnation of their Logos. Theophilus explains the meaning
of the name "Christian" as signifying that "we are anointed with the oil of
God."

Minucius Felix heaps scorn on any
doctrine of a crucified man as divine and redeemer (indicating that he is aware
of some who hold to such a thing), while Tatian alludes to "stories" told by
both Greeks and Christians, implying that both are of the same nature, mythical
tales not to be taken literally. Only Justin has embraced the story and the
figure as presented in some early form of written Gospel, but even he, in
recounting his conversion experience of a couple of decades earlier (Dialogue
with Trypho, 3-8), shows a telltale void about belief in an historical man
in the faith movement he joined. Into Trypho’s mouth (8:6) he places the
accusation that "you invent a Christ for yourselves."

If these are
the salient pieces of the documentary record of the time, how have scholars
traditionally tried to put them together? Almost universally, they have taken
the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, which is attested to only in Gospels beginning
in the late first century, and placed him prior to the earliest records—the
letters of Paul and other epistles of the New Testament—which themselves contain
no sign of him. To compensate for this absence in the early record, they have
extracted elements from the Gospels and attempted to trace roots of these back
to the supposed time of Jesus, thinking to uncover words and deeds which can be
attributed to him. These attempted excavations will be evaluated later.

But the other anomaly which
scholars have had to address is perhaps even more challenging. If Jesus died
around 30 CE, and was no more than a charismatic preacher of the Kingdom (not
too charismatic, since he sank without a trace in all the non-Christian record
of the first century), how are we to explain the manner in which he is presented
in the earliest surviving Christian writings which begin no more than two
decades after his death, and which would seem to contain older elements reaching
back to a time when he had scarcely been laid in his grave?

Scholars have long realized that
early Christian writers present us with a thoroughly divine Christ. They
acknowledge that Paul, together with the cultic circles he represents, has made
a leap so far beyond the human Jesus portrayed in the Gospels that the latter
figure has been completely lost sight of. Herman Ridderbos is only one of a
multitude of voices expressing the same resounding perplexity:

"No one who examines the
Gospels...and then reads the epistles of Paul can escape the impression that he
is moving in two entirely different spheres....When Paul writes of Jesus as the
Christ, historical and human traits appear to be obscure, and Christ appears to
have significance only as a transcendent divine being." (Paul and Jesus,
p.3). He goes on to ask: "Jesus was not dead the length of a human lifetime
before his stature was not only infinitely increased, but also entirely changed.
How did this come about?"

Others, such as Rudolf Bultmann,14
have put the situation in different terms: that the early church almost
immediately lost all interest in the human life lived by its Master and placed
its entire focus on his nature and role as the Crucified and Risen Lord. Not
even the pinnacle of salvation history, the event of the cross, is located upon
the hill of Calvary, nor his resurrection placed in the context of an empty tomb
outside Jerusalem. Norman Perrin15
has presented a picture of the early church which made no real distinction, he
says, between the historical Jesus and the exalted Christ, seeing both figures
as continuous. This made no clarification necessary between what Jesus on earth
had said and what he continued to say in his new spiritual state (an attempt to
explain why nothing of the former actually appears, stated as such, in the
record).

In all these scenarios, there are
difficulties which commentators have been reluctant to face, difficulties which
make many of their assumptions virtually impossible.

Against the Jewish Grain

The first difficulty is that the
vast majority of the earliest Christians were, of course, Jews. "God is One,"
says the most fundamental of Jewish theological tenets. Moreover, the Jewish
mind had an obsession against associating anything human with God. He could not
be represented by even the suggestion of a human image, and Jews in their
thousands had bared their necks before Pilate’s swords simply to protest against
the mounting of military standards bearing Caesar’s image within sight of the
Temple. The idea that a man was a literal part of God would have been met by any
Jew with horror and apoplexy.

And yet we are to believe that
Jews were immediately led to elevate Jesus of Nazareth to divine levels
unprecedented in the entire history of human religion. We are to believe not
only that they identified a crucified criminal with the ancient God of Abraham,
but that they went about the empire and practically overnight converted huge
numbers of other Jews to the same outrageous—and thoroughly
blasphemous—proposition. Within a handful of years of Jesus’ supposed death, we
know of Christian communities in many major cities of the empire, all presumably
having accepted that a man they had never met, crucified as a political rebel on
a hill outside Jerusalem, had risen from the dead and was in fact the
pre-existent Son of God, creator, sustainer, and redeemer of the world.

Since many of the Christian
communities Paul worked in existed before he got there, and since Paul’s letters
do not support the picture Acts paints of intense missionary activity on the
part of the Jerusalem group around Peter and James, history does not record who
performed this astounding feat.16

Moreover, it was apparently done
without any need for justification. There is not a murmur in any Pauline letter,
nor in any other epistle, that Christians had to defend such an outlandish
doctrine. No one seems to challenge Christian preaching on these grounds, for
the point is never addressed. Even in 1 Corinthians 1:18-24, where Paul defends
the "wisdom of God" (meaning the message he preaches) against the "wisdom of the
world", he fails to provide any defense for, or even a mention of, the elevation
of Jesus of Nazareth to divinity. He can admit that to the Greeks and Jews the
doctrine of the cross—that is, the idea of a crucified Messiah—is "folly" and "a
stumbling block." But this has nothing to do with turning a man into God, a
piece of folly he never discusses or defends. That his opponents, and the Jewish
establishment in general, would not have challenged him on this basic Christian
position, forcing him to provide some justification, is inconceivable.

A Reticent Preaching
Movement

Could any apostle have maintained
such a silence in his missionary activities? If Paul were preaching a man who
was God, would not his listeners and converts have demanded to know about the
life of this man, his sayings and deeds? Whether Paul liked it or not, the human
Jesus would have become a focus of discussion between himself and his
congregations, details of which would certainly surface in his letters. None do.

Paul could hardly have set out on
a career to bring the message about Jesus to the gentile all across the known
world without possessing a certain amount of information about the man he
intended to preach. Yet what effort did he make to acquire such information?
During the first 17 years following his conversion, and after waiting three of
those years, he spent exactly two weeks in Jerusalem with the men who had
presumably known Jesus in his ministry and were the custodians of that
information. All he did at the time, so he tells us (Galatians 1:18-19), was
"get to know Peter" and see James. Did they give him a crash course in their
memories of Jesus’ life and ministry? Paul gives no hint of such a thing, and no
details are ever relayed to his readers.

Christianity was in competition
with the Graeco-Roman mystery cults, with many salvation messages spread by
wandering philosophers and devotees of the cultic gods. An important benefit
offered by these deities was protection against the evil spirits. Yet the
pseudo-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians, which have a special interest in these
matters, fail to point out that, unlike the other savior deities, Christ had
been incarnated in flesh and blood in recent history. He had experienced and
countered such demonic forces first hand, on earth. He had demonstrated his
power over them through his miracles, exorcising them from sick people. In his
ministry, Jesus had shown compassion, tolerance, generosity, all those things
men and women thirsted for in confronting a hostile, uncaring world. It is
simply unthinkable that Paul or anyone else would ignore or lose interest in all
these advantages of the human Jesus when presenting to their listeners, gentile
or Jew, the Christian agent of salvation.

Starring Jesus in a
Mythological Drama

Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus
Seminar, in his Honest to Jesus,17
is at pains to point out that Christianity developed as a clash between "the
cult of Christ" and "the gospel of Jesus." Paul is supposed to have been the
main culprit in creating the former and blocking access to the latter. Funk
admits that the cultic branch is entirely mythic in character, that it was
strongly influenced by scripture and hellenistic savior cult ideas of a
dying/rising god. Yet how could hellenistic mythological ideashave made
such strong and sudden inroads into the thinking of those who followed the human
Jesus? What, in anyone’s mind, would a counter-culture preacher of the Kingdom,
executed by the Roman authorities for some kind of perceived subversion,
possibly have had to do with mythic savior gods and world redemption which could
have led anyone to cast him so thoroughly in this mold—to the exclusion of all
trace of the preaching original?

Scholars have long tried to offer
scenarios to explain this process. One runs like this: In their fervor and
distress following the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus scrambled to
understand what had just happened, to interpret the meaning of their Master’s
life, to put a name to his role in God’s plan. They ran to their bibles and
began to apply all manner of scriptural passages to him, especially those looked
upon as messianic by the Jewish thinking of the time. But they turned as well to
contemporary hellenistic mythology about the Logos, supplementing it with the
Jewish equivalent in the figure of personified Wisdom, throwing in for good
measure dim (to us) myths about descending-ascending heavenly redeemers. Those
early Christian thinkers absorbed all this vast cultural pleroma and decided
that their Jesus of Nazareth had in fact been the true embodiment of all these
myths and proceeded to pile them, willy-nilly, upon him. This "morning after"
ransack of current philosophy and the Jewish scriptures led, so they say, to the
highly elevated, mythological picture created of Jesus so soon after his death,
and to a conviction that he had been "resurrected".

The first thing we have to ask
ourselves is: who did all this? It was hardly a circle of simple fishermen
around Jesus, like Peter or the sons of Zebedee, who as the Gospels portray them
could probably barely read, let alone turn themselves practically overnight into
Philonic-type exegetes of the Septuagint and contemporary Greek philosophy. If
it was Paul alone, how could he ever have worked with the Jerusalem circle of
apostles? In fact, his letters show no dispute on such a score; he enjoyed close
contact and cooperation with the group around Peter, even if it could sometimes
be an uneasy relationship. If it was a larger circle of more sophisticated minds
of which Paul’s is the only name to come down to us, one perhaps based in
Antioch as some suggest: whatever gave such a group the impetus to do this? To
apply to a crucified preacher whom they had never personally experienced, the
loftiest philosophical and religious concepts of their day? And where is the
evidence for the split which would surely have taken place in the early
Christian movement between such head-in-the-clouds philosophers and a simpler
core of disciples who had followed the human Jesus and heard him preach, a
preaching in which he would scarcely have presented himself in these terms?
There is not the slightest evidence of any disagreement in the ranks over such
mythologizing tendencies.

This raises another question. How
is one to explain how all this mythologizing of a recent man gained such wide
acceptance? It might be one thing to say that certain followers of Jesus
(whoever they may have been) were so immersed in religious arcana as to see
nothing unusual in casting their Master in these mythological terms. It is quite
another to understand how the average man or woman who was approached with a
Christian message like this could so readily embrace it. Such claims for a
recent man (who hardly claimed such things for himself), especially one executed
as a subversive, would have been met with laughter or blank stares—as, no doubt,
would the claim that he had risen from his tomb. What could possibly explain why
so many apparently made such a bizarre leap of faith?

Even if such mythological motifs
were current in the cultural consciousness of the day, how difficult would it be
to persuade the hearer that all these myths, hitherto familiar in a spiritual
context only, should now be applied to a human being—a crucified criminal? Early
Christian preaching would have had to center around the justification for all
this, yet this is precisely what is missing from the earliest correspondence.

One-Sided Interpretations

Scholars have had a traditional
way of describing the application of philosophical and scriptural content to
Jesus in the early literature, from Hebrews’ High Priest making the sacrifice of
his own blood in the heavenly sanctuary to Paul’s pre-existent Son. This, they
say, was an "interpretation" of the man and the role he was now seen to have
played. But how are we to understand an "enterpretation" when the thing being
interpreted is never mentioned?

Suzanne Lehne, for example, in her
study of Hebrews (The New Covenant in Hebrews, p.27), explains that
scripture helped the author "articulate his beliefs" about "the Christ event."
But nowhere in Hebrews does the author intimate that he is articulating any
historical Christ event, and in fact, a reference in scripture is usually
treated as though it is part of that event, not an explanation of
something else, let alone recent history. It is from scripture that the "event"
of Christ has been constructed; these are not "proof-texts" but "source-texts".

John Knox, in Myth and Truth
(p.59), explains Ephesians 1:3-10 as a kind of hymn created to explain Jesus in
entirely supernatural terms. He speaks of "the remembered man Jesus," and "the
wonder of his deeds and words." But where are these things in Ephesians 1:3-10
or anywhere else? We cannot accept Knox’s claim that the myth in Ephesians is
built upon "historical data" when that data is never pointed to. A better
explanation would be that the historical data has been added to the myth at a
later time. Knox, like New Testament scholarship in general, is guilty of
reading into the early Christian mythological presentation of the divine Christ
the historical context derived from the later Gospels. The Christ myth as an
interpretation of an historical event is a fantasy.

New Forays into Christian
Origins

Newer scenarios about how the
Christian movement began and how Jesus became the Christ have attempted to be
more subtle and comprehensive. Burton Mack suggests18
that, in addition to Galilean groups who regarded Jesus as no more than a human
teacher, gentile circles in places like Antioch were responsible, over a period
of time, for applying current mythological interpretations to Jesus of Nazareth,
and that Paul was converted to one of these "cults". But this scenario has
problems. Jews still made up a sizeable component of the community in Antioch.
Did they simply allow gentiles to persuade them to betray the most cherished
principles of their Jewish heritage? The idea of gradual evolution (Mack
suggests it took place over a period of 25 years) is belied by pre-Pauline
elements like the hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, which are likely, as Mack admits,
very early developments. As for Paul himself (according to information in
Galatians19), his conversion was
also too early to allow the time needed for such processes to take place,
especially in distant centers. And are we to believe that he too—a Jew born and
bred, so he tells us—swallowed the blasphemous proposition that a man was God,
as a result of some gentile sucker-punch? Even among those gentiles, such an
elevation of a human man would have been unprecedented and far from easy.

For we must still answer the
question "why". What would have led Paul, or gentiles off in northern Syria, to
take a simple preacher, whom they knew only by report, and turn him into a
cosmic deity, no matter what their diet of hellenistic mystery ideas? The appeal
could not have been in his message and charisma as a teacher, since they
immediately stripped off this skin and discarded it. If Paul had no interest in
the teacher and his teachings, of what use was this Jesus to him as a candidate
for divine redeemer? Both Mack and Robert Funk20
speak of the Pauline cult’s point of departure as the fact of Jesus’ "noble
death", but noble deaths are common enough in history, including Jewish history,
and rarely if ever do they lead to divinization on so exalted a scale. The
simple fact of a reputed noble death would hardly have led an educated,
observant Jew like Paul to contravene the most sacred precepts of his heritage
and associate this particular man, one he had never met, with God.

In any event, the cultic
presentation of Jesus’ crucifixion does not fit the "noble death" scenario. The
latter is classically of the warrior or teacher who dies for his country, his
followers, his teachings. These things focus on a life, a cause: in Judaism, it
is invariably for the sake of the Law. This is precisely what is missing in the
Christ cult, which has nothing to do with Jesus’ life, teachings or followers.
Dying for sin is not in the same category, especially when placed in the spirit
realm; this is a mystical, spiritual concept.

Listening For a Footstep . .
.

It would seem that the
"straightforward proposition" with which this article began is not compatible
with Piece No. 2, "A Transcendent Christ", for no feasible path can be traced
from the presumed historical Jesus to the earliest expression (as a cosmic
redeeming deity) found about him in the early Christian record. No acceptable
explanation can be found for why such a leap would have been made in the first
place, who made it, how Jewish sensibilities could have been overcome, and why
in the process the human man who presumably started it all would have completely
disappeared into a black hole.

When we add Piece No. 3, "A Time
of Revelation", we find that Paul and others are, in fact, making it impossible
to assume that they identify the beginning of the faith movement with an
historical man. Through passages like Romans 16:25, Colossians 1:26, Ephesians
3:5, etc., they tell us that this is a time of revelation about the Son through
the medium of the Spirit and the holy scriptures. These secrets "hidden for long
generations" are only now being unveiled to the world through apostles like
Paul, not through any historical Jesus.

In 2 Corinthians 5:18, Paul tells
his readers: "From first to last this has been the work of God,21
who has reconciled us to himself through Christ, having given us the ministry of
reconciliation." It is apostles like Paul who have been "entrusted by God with
the message of reconciliation" (v.19). That Paul is not sharing the limelight
with any recent Jesus of Nazareth and his
ministry is also borne out in an earlier passage, with not even a "through
Christ" to temper the personal eulogy. It begins (3:5-6): "Such qualification as
we have comes from God; it is he who has qualified us to dispense his new
covenant."

Paul’s total disregard for the
role of Jesus himself in dispensing the new covenant is astounding. But he goes
on to say that the old covenant had been inaugurated with divine splendor, as
reflected in the face of Moses. He asks, "Must not even greater splendor rest
upon (be reflected in) the divine dispensation of the Spirit?" Paul has passed
over any splendor which might have been contained in the face of Jesus and his
career, and settles on that of the missionary movement, impelled by the Spirit
sent from God. "How much more," he asks, "shall the ministry of righteousness"
—meaning his own ministry— "abound in glory?" (Here my translation.) "The
splendor that once was (i.e., in the old covenant) is now...outshone by a
splendor greater still." To this mansion of glory in which Paul has taken up
residence, Jesus is not even let in by the servants’ entrance!

Such passages ignore any role
Jesus might have played in recent salvation history, but what of those which
leave absolutely no room for it? Titus 1:3, speaking in Paul’s name, is a good
example: "Yes, it is eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised long ages
ago, and now in his own good time he has openly declared himself in the
proclamation which was entrusted to me by ordinance of God our Savior." There is
not a crack in this facade where Jesus could gain a foothold. In the past lie
God’s promises of eternal life, and his first action on those promises is the
present revelation to apostles like Paul who have gone out to proclaim the
message. Jesus’ own proclamation of eternal life, his own person as the
embodiment of that life (as the Gospel of John so memorably puts it), has
evaporated into the wind.

1 Peter (1:12) declares that the
things the prophets told of have now been announced, not by Jesus in his own
ministry, but "by those preaching the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit
sent from heaven." Titus 2:4 and 3:4 speak of what has "dawned upon the world"
in the present. Rather than Jesus himself, it is "the grace of God" and "the
kindness and generosity of God our Savior." Scholars, when they have allowed
themselves to worry about such things, declare these to be metaphorical
references to Jesus of Nazareth. This is an interpretation born of desperation.

. . . And a Voice

If the movement began with a man
who preached on earth, we are at a loss to explain how even the simple knowledge
or presentation of this feature cannot be found in any early strand of the
documentary evidence. Compounding this puzzlement is the presence in many
epistles of moral teachings and maxims familiar from the Gospel record
(including some of Q’s "authentic" sayings), yet without the slightest
attribution to its Jesus figure.22
From the Beatitudes to pronouncements on love, to judging and oaths and
approaching God and loving enemies and turning the other cheek, not to mention
dozens of apocalyptic sentiments which are found in Jesus’ mouth in the Gospels,
none are presented as the voice of Jesus. Some are said to come directly from
God, as in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, while others (such as Paul’s "words of the
Lord") are regarded as the product of inspiration from the spiritual Christ in
heaven. Scholarly commentaries are full of expressions of surprise and
perplexity on all this silence about the product of the teaching Jesus.23

A quick look at Romans 10 and 11
should convince any unprejudiced observer that Paul knows of no historical
preaching Jesus. (I’ll leave it to the reader to consult this passage.) He seeks
to emphasize the Jews’ guilt in not responding to the message delivered by
apostles like himself, even though they have had every opportunity to do so. And
yet he fails to include the opportunity offered by Jesus’ very own person and
preaching. Several points in 10:11-21 cry out for some reference, some hint, of
the historical ministry, yet none is forthcoming.24
Paul then goes on in chapter 11 to refer to the longstanding myth of the Jews
killing their prophets sent from God, yet not a murmur is heard of the killing
of the Son of God himself. Nothing can explain away these silences.

The Epistle to the Hebrews opens
with the statement that "in this final age (God) has spoken to us through the
Son," and then proceeds to give us not a word spoken by this Son—at least not in
any historical, earthly setting. Rather, the Son’s voice comes out of the sacred
writings; scripture is his platform. In 10:5 the Son speaks in a kind of
"mythical present" through a passage from Psalm 40 (actually, 39 LXX).

“That is why, at his coming into
the world, he says:
‘Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire,
But thou hast prepared a body for me.
Whole-offerings and sin-offerings thou didst not delight in.
Then I said: “Here am I: as it is written of
me in the scroll,
I have come, O God, to do thy will..”
’ ”

In this one passage we can see the
type of source which gave rise to the idea that the spiritual Son had taken on
or entered "flesh" (at first this was envisioned within the lower spiritual
realm: see Piece No. 5), and the idea that this Son had undergone sacrifice. For
the writer of Hebrews, Christ’s was the ultimate sacrifice which would supplant
once for all the sacrifices of the Temple cult which God no longer wanted. The
idea of "his coming into the world" is not presented in any historical sense,
much less in the context of a Gospel story, but scholars have often struggled to
try to relate these verses to an earthly incarnation. Paul Ellingworth however,
realizes that the "he says" is "a timeless present referring to the permanent
record of scripture."25
This removes it from any historical context.

We are skirting Platonic ideas
here, with their concept of a higher world of timeless reality. It is in this
spiritual world that Christ operates, as Hebrews’ portrayal of the sacrifice
offered in the heavenly sanctuary clearly indicates. The "coming into the world"
is still a mythical one, as is the idea of operating "in flesh".26

In the same vein, Ephesians 2:17
is especially interesting. "And coming, he (Christ) proclaimed the good news..."
But what was the content of that news? Instead of taking the opportunity to
refer to some teachings of Jesus’ presumed ministry, the writer quotes Isaiah.
(Even the introductory phrase quoted above is based on Isaiah 52:7.) Like
Hebrews, the Son is envisioned as speaking through the sacred writings. The Son
inhabits the spiritual world of the scriptures, God’s newly-opened window onto
the unseen true reality.27
It is the "coming" of that voice, perceived through revelation and a fresh
reading of scripture, which has launched the new age and the Christian movement.

Part Three
SOLVING THE JESUS PUZZLE

We are led to
conclude that the beginning of the Christian movement was not a response to any
human individual at one time and location. Christianity was born in a thousand
places, out of the fertile religious and philosophical soil of the time,
expressing faith in an intermediary Son who was a channel to God, providing
knowledge, love and salvation. It sprang up in many innovative minds like
Paul’s, among independent communities and sects all over the empire, producing a
variety of forms and doctrines. Some of it tapped into traditional Jewish
Messiah expectation and apocalyptic sentiment, other expressions were tied to
more Platonic ways of thinking. Greek mystery concepts also fed into the
volatile mix. Many groups (though not all) adopted the term "Christ" for their
divine figure, as well as the name "Jesus", which in Hebrew has the meaning of
"Savior". Paul and the Jerusalem brotherhood around Peter and James were simply
one strand of this broad salvation movement, although an important and
ultimately very influential one. Later, in a mythmaking process of its own, the
Jerusalem circle with Paul as its satellite was adopted as the originating cell
of the whole Christian movement.

But there was another factor
involved. New reform impulses and moral concerns were in the air as well, both
as part of the many manifestations of the Christ movement and on their own among
other, non-cultic circles who preached a coming End-time and transformation of
the world. All these groups tended to produce ethical teachings, parables of the
Kingdom, stories of conflict experiences. In the end, this increasing store of
sectarian expression impelled the creation of a new, artificial figure: the one
who had originated such things. Within the cultic movement, this process
eventually led to the Proclaimed being brought to earth and turned into the
Proclaimer.

That such teaching and Kingdom
material had originally nothing to do with any one individual, much less a Jesus
of Nazareth, is a possibility yet to be addressed by New Testament scholarship,
and thus the search for the "genuine" historical Jesus as preacher and prophet
goes on.28 The Jesus Seminar and others have
declared him unearthed from the roots of Q, a first century document produced by
Jewish circles in Galilee preaching the Kingdom of God.

Excavating the Q Foundations

The modern analysis of Q29
as an evolutionary accumulation of three differentiated layers of material, is
undoubtedly reliable. Yet it offers us a Jesus who is an anomaly: a Jewish
preacher who yet shows no interest in things Jewish, for in the so-called Q1
layer, we hear a cosmopolitan, very un-Jewish voice, one that bears a strong
resemblance to Cynic preaching and practice; this was a Greek counterculture
movement of the time spread by wandering Cynic sages.30
Moreover, these sayings sound like the product of a school or lifestyle,
developed over time and hardly the sudden invention of a single mind. When
certain Q1 material turns up in other venues (with the exception of the Gospel
of Thomas: see below), it is never attributed to a Jesus but seems (as Laws
observes) to be part of a general stock of ethical material, probably adopted by
many reform-minded groups during this period. If a real man were the source of
this teaching and the impulse to the formation of a preaching movement, why does
he come down to us in such a meager, tortuous fashion?

We need to be suspicious also at
the about-face evidenced by the Q2 material. From teachings which seem so
cosmopolitan, open-minded and full of visions of the ideal society, not to
mention so lacking in Jewish orientation and concerns, how does the community
proceed, within supposedly only a few years, to the harsh, punitive,
narrow-minded apocalyptic fulmination of the Q2 sayings, whose atmosphere and
interests are quite definitely of a Jewish and sectarian nature? Does this not
point to the strong possibility that the Q1 material comes from an external
source, adopted (and perhaps adapted) by a Q community which turns out not to be
quite so admirable and visionary as starry-eyed commentators would like to
portray them? The common explanation that tensions resulting from rejection
caused this about-face do not seem to be adequate, especially to account for the
stark shift to Jewish apocalypticism.

There are other telltale signs in
the second layer of Q that all this condemnation was originally directed at a
failure to respond to the community’s preaching of the Kingdom, not to the
teaching or person of Jesus. The apocalyptic Son of Man sayings are not
identified with Jesus, which is why, when they were later placed in his mouth,
Jesus sounds as though he is talking about someone else. John the Baptist in the
Q2 layer (3:7-19) prophecies an eschatological judge, not a teacher-founder
Jesus. The saying found in Luke 16:16 is especially revealing: "Until John there
was the Law and the prophets; since then, there is the good news of the kingdom
of God." This, like so much of Q, is acknowledged to be a product of the
community’s own experience and time (i.e., not going back to Jesus), and yet no
reference to Jesus himself has been worked into this picture of the change from
the old to the new. Luke 11:49 also leaves out the Son of God when speaking of
those whom Wisdom promised to send.

In fact, that verse and others
point to the source of the Q1 sayings as perceived by the later community. They
were the product of, or inspired by, personified Wisdom. The Q1 stage is
recognized as "sapiential," that is, an instructional collection in the same
genre as traditional "wisdom" books like Proverbs. John is identified as a
"child of Wisdom", and so was Jesus (Lk. 7:35) when he was introduced into the
picture: see below.

Commentators like Mack have
attempted to explain why Q contains no hint of Jesus’ death, let alone a
resurrection. All fall back on the idea that news of such an event did not reach
them in Galilee, or that it held no interest for them. Neither explanation is
acceptable. The group which "remained" in Jerusalem is said to have had roots in
Galilee which would certainly have remained active. And if there is one
prominent motif to be found in Q’s second layer, it is the theme of the killing
of the prophets. Had the founder’s fate been execution, there is no way this
would not eventually have been seized on and incorporated into the community’s
consciousness. The alternative (something Mack tentatively suggests) is that
there was no death—at least not a memorable one, no execution by the authorities
at all. Of course, this places the burden on the cultic side of things: if Jesus
died a natural death, what historical fuel drove Paul and his fellows to build
their mythic crucifixion? An impossible situation either way.

Filling In the Gaps

One of the great anomalies in Q is
the lack of any contexts for the majority of its sayings. The few that have them
can be located in the Q3 layer. For every single Q1 and Q2 saying, Matthew and
Luke have been forced to provide their own contexts and set-up lines within
their picture of Jesus’ ministry. Not even something like the Lord’s Prayer is
given a common setting between the two Synoptic evangelists. If the community
had associated these sayings with a Jesus right from the beginning, and taking
into account the amount of redaction the document underwent through its various
stages, it is virtually impossible that over the course of time some of these
would not have had little context references added to them (whether accurately
preserved or simply invented), so that Matthew and Luke would betray some
presence of such things. Only a handful of anecdotes, like the dialogue between
Jesus and John, or the Capernaum miracle, show any such development, and these
bear signs of being late, of tendentious redaction. They are composite
creations, put together out of earlier discrete units.

This can be illustrated by a
comparison with the Gospel of Thomas. This too presents itself as a collection
of sayings attributed to Jesus and has been enlisted in support of the
'discovery' of Jesus at the roots of Q. Thomas shows far less development than
Q. Most of its sayings are prefaced only by a simple "Jesus said," while a few
have scraps of set-up lines. Like Q, it contains no death and resurrection
motifs.

But there is some form of
relationship between the two documents, and since the Gospel of Thomas contains
the more primitive form of those sayings they hold in common, most of which are
located at the Q1 level, we can deduce that the roots of Thomas split off from Q
at an early stage of Q development (or possibly vice-versa). The identification
with Jesus could have been added at any later time in reaction to the widespread
development of an historical figure, probably some time in the first half of the
2nd century. (The unearthed copy of Thomas is based on a Greek version which
goes back to the mid second century.)

Thomas confirms that the evolution
of Q involved stages of considerable recasting, including joining individual
sayings into dialogues and anecdotes (a common practice of the period). A simple
saying in Thomas, #78, where it would seem to refer to Jesus, appears in Q in an
extended construction, the dialogue between Jesus and John (Lk. 7:18-35), where
it is made to apply to John. This is a dead giveaway that the Q pericope is an
invention. The set of three chreic responses in Q1 (Lk. 9:57-62) are similarly
shown to be later redacted units.

Thus, all the signs point to no
Jesus in the earlier layers of Q.

Q’s Founder Emerges

When and why did the idea of a
founder figure emerge in the Q community’s thinking? It appeared at the Q3
level, when certain dialogue, pronouncement and miracle anecdotes were
constructed or revamped from earlier material to embody him, and minor changes
were made to some individual sayings to reflect his voice.

Reform impulses and apocalyptic
expectations are things which solidify groups of like-minded people into sects,
set against the wider world around them which largely rejects such extreme
messages and thus receives the sect’s condemnation. Q2 preserves the community’s
hostile reaction to rejection, and even Paul itemizes the suffering he has
endured at the hands of those unreceptive to his gospel. When groups become more
sectarianized, certain social phenomena take place. Attitudes of "inside" and
"outside" solidify. A bulwark is created to defend against attack. Community
practices need to be justified, and the beliefs of those who now consider
themselves an elect must be supported.

Thus the sect’s view of its
theology and history tends to evolve to serve the primary purpose of filling its
needs as a distinct and isolated social group. The past is reconstructed to
render it sacred. Current faith and teaching, ritual and practice, are bolstered
by showing that such things had been there from the beginning, that they had
been formulated under divine auspices, in inspiring circumstances, and
preferably by a heroic founder figure with a pipeline to the deity—perhaps even
sent by, or a part of, the deity itself.

This process can be seen in the
evolution of Q. Q1 is a body of Cynic-style material, probably ultimately from a
Greek source. Perhaps Mack is right in postulating a cosmopolitan Galilee, a
strongly hellenistic environment in which certain Jewish circles began preaching
the Kingdom. Here Jews could absorb foreign ideas without difficulty, and may
have adopted Greek Cynic material as providing a suitable ethic for their
Kingdom movement.

However, opposition from an
unreceptive environment soon led to the formulation of prophetic and
condemnatory sayings, together with little anecdotes (also of a Cynic nature)
embodying the conflict between sect and establishment. Q2 added the darker side
of sectarianism and apocalyptic expectation to the original body of enlightened,
cosmopolitan material. No Jesus had yet spoken such things. This was still a
record of the community’s own teachings and articulated stance toward others.
And the sect may originally have regarded itself as spokespersons for the Wisdom
of God. Her presence within the community’s thinking is revealed by Luke in
11:49: "That is why the Wisdom of God said..." Instead of "Jesus said" at the
earlier stages of Q, it may have been "Wisdom said".

That chink left open by Luke may
well reveal the entire early landscape of Q, a landscape empty of any Jesus
figure at all, peopled by a preaching movement inspired from heaven and working
under Wisdom’s direction. As she had done throughout Israel’s past, Wisdom had
sent this culminating wave of messengers to proclaim God’s salvation, and as in
the past, they had received hostility, rejection, even death.

But Wisdom was not the ideal
founder figure, for she was only a spiritual entity. What the Q community needed
was a human, heroic progenitor, one who had actually spoken the sayings, done
the deeds, set the precedents. The very existence of the sayings collection
would have invited attribution to an originating and authoritative figure. And
so, Wisdom was transformed into her ideal representative, a "child of Wisdom".
Matthew in his use of Q reflects a further evolving attitude to Jesus as the
very incarnation of Wisdom herself, and many of Jesus’ sayings in Q are
recognized as borrowed Wisdom sayings.

But this founder figure was not
yet cast as divine, and the term "Christ" is never used of him. He is not
envisioned as the Messiah, though he takes on the identity of "the coming one"
when he becomes associated with the Son of Man, and there seem to be intimations
of divinity which come in at the final phase of Q in the form of the Temptation
Story. Nor is he a redeemer, for there is no soteriology attached to Jesus in
any stage of Q. He is simply a glorified embodiment of the Q preachers
themselves, doing what the Q people had done from the beginning, only better. He
opened the door for men and women’s entry into the new Kingdom.

Of course, John the Baptist had to
be realigned, and so he was recast as the forerunner, the herald to whom the
founder Jesus had been superior. This would also put the rival followers of John
the Baptist (by now perhaps a separate sect) in their place. This rivalry,
together with the fact that John had not been known as a Wisdom teacher, may
have precluded any tendency to make John himself the founder of the Q sect.

Q and the Gospels

How do we relate the latest phase
of Q to the developing Gospels? On one level and in the same manner as Q, the
Gospels are creations motivated by the sectarian needs discussed above. They are
foundation documents which embody the principles of the sect’s faith and
practice and its stance toward the outside world. That "foundation" is
fictionalized in a mythic tale about a founder figure, a tale which does two
things: it translates the redeeming spirit-realm activities of its deity into an
earthly setting, and it adds the epitomization of the work and beliefs of the
Markan community itself, focusing these on its Jesus of Nazareth.

The Markan Jesus, as intermediary
Son and Redeemer, has been drawn from the cultic Christ of the Pauline type
(although there seems to be no direct use of the specific ideas of Paul, unless
the Lord’s Supper myth has come from Paul through indirect channels). This makes
it likely that the Markan community was a cultic group to begin with.31
But Mark also betrays Q-like traditions, and a debate still rages as to whether
he also had access to some form of Q, or perhaps had come in oral contact with
members of the Q community.32

The key question then becomes: did
Mark, in casting his Christ in a human character and local setting, draw on
recently developed conceptions about a founder figure in the Q community? Did
the Q Jesus serve as a model or inspiration for Mark’s Jesus of Nazareth?
Without a copy of the Q document itself, Mark may have had little of substance
about this figure to draw on, and thus we find the curious paucity of teachings
in Mark’s Gospel,33
and the absence of almost any of the Q anecdotes incorporated by Matthew and
Luke.

In any event, the Q traditions
lacked biographical and contextual elements, so Mark had only scripture to draw
on for detail to flesh out his Jesus "biography". This, as modern scholarship
has come to realize, was founded on the principles of midrash and modelled on
the story of the Suffering Righteous One. It is very possible that Mark, and
perhaps Matthew and Luke (and even John), regarded their midrashic tale as
symbolic only, and its Jesus figure as not historical. In such a state, these
early versions of the Gospels would have remained in that limbo for a generation
or more, undisseminated beyond their own communities, until wider forces and new
interpretations led the evangelists’ Jesus of Nazareth out onto the historical
stage.

Finally, it has been suggested
that various first century preacher/Zealots and would-be Messiah figures who
agitated for revolutionary or apocalyptic change, and were usually dispatched by
the military authorities (perhaps one was even executed by Pilate!), provided a
partial model for the creation of Mark’s Jesus figure, or perhaps even that of Q
at some stage. But this is a far cry from saying that the Gospel Jesus
represents an historical figure in any meaningful fashion, or that thereby we
can say that "there was an historical Jesus."

An Unresolved Question

As a final consideration, I might
suggest that the situation between Mark and Q could be even more complex. Most
scholars find some echo in Mark of Q ideas and experiences. But could the
influence have extended in the other direction, too? Q surfaces for the first
time in Matthew and Luke, likely after the turn of the second century. What
recent revisions and additions might have been made to it? (It is thought the
two evangelists used different "editions" of Q.) There is no necessity to assume
they are resurrecting some document that had been dead or fixed for several
decades. This line of approach may also help solve the one intriguing question
where my view of Q is concerned.

Why should the invented Q founder,
with no connection to the cults of Paul or the usual savior concepts, have been
named Jesus—which has the meaning of "savior" and the echo of divinity?

Was the term so widespread among
Jewish sectarian circles that it exercised a compelling attraction on the
Kingdom-preaching community in Galilee? This would imply that the Q people,
perhaps in the decade or so following the Jewish War, were by that time aware of
the spiritual Christ cults flourishing in the wider world, and thus of the
higher significance of the name. If so, did this impel that move toward divinity
discernible in the final phase of Q3?

Or could, perhaps, the latest
stage of Q postdate the earliest phase of Mark, and had there been crossover
influences? As part of this question, we would then ask: had Q3 used the name
"Jesus" at all?

Even if it nowhere appeared in the
text, even if another designation had been used by the Q3 redactors in passages
like the dialogue between Jesus and John, Matthew and Luke, under the influence
of Mark and because they were not conscious of reproducing history, would have
changed it to Jesus.

But there is another possibility.
It is not improbable that some intervening hand, before the later Synoptics came
to be written, had already altered Q3’s original designation for its founder to
fit a deepening trend: the near-universality of the name Jesus among a host of
apocalyptic and salvation sects. Perhaps this had been done under the influence
of a newly-minted Mark. Perhaps the altering hand was someone who saw the Q
document as a surviving record, or a related account—historical or otherwise—of
the humanized divine Christ of the Gospel of Mark.

A written Q, in fact, may finally
have found its way to the Markan community and after minor alterations, rested
for a time on the same shelf as the recently constructed Gospel. It was left to
a later evangelist in a neighboring community to amalgamate the two after copies
reached him by the same post, so to speak. Some years after that, another
evangelist, this one a little further away perhaps, whose community had
different, more gentile interests, got wind of the two documents, arranged for
copies and did his own reworking.

The construction of an historical
Jesus was well under way.

*

Notes

1
Since it contains an unmistakable allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem, and
because it is not in keeping with what Paul elsewhere says about his fellow
countrymen. See, for example, Birger Pearson: 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16: A
Deutero-Pauline Interpolation, HTR 64 (1971), 79-94. [See Supplementary
Article No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus?:
The Jews "Who Killed the Lord Jesus".]

2
For example, Origen, in his ContraCelsum discusses a few times
(e.g., I, 46 and 67) the veracity of Jesus’ miracles; if Josephus had referred
to Jesus as a "doer of wonderful deeds" (as scholars like J. D. Crossan claim),
he would hardly have passed up the opportunity to appeal to the Jewish
historian’s witness. Some claim that Origen’s statement in Contra Celsum
I, 47 that Josephus "did not believe in Jesus as the Christ" constitutes an
oblique reference to such a passage, but this is better explained as Origen’s
reaction to the fact that Josephus declares, in Jewish Wars VI, 312-13,
that the Jews’ predictions about a Messiah really applied to the emperor
Vespasian. [See Supplementary Article No. 10: Josephus
Unbound.]

3
Origen uses a copy which has Josephus regarding the destruction of Jerusalem as
a divine punishment for the murder of James, whereas no surviving copy of
Josephus makes any such suggestion. [See the sections on the "lost reference" in
Josephus Unbound.]

5
J. D. Quinn in the Anchor Bible Commentaries (Titus, p.65) says that "the
phrase pro chronon aionion refers to the timeless order in which God
himself lives, in contrast to the chronoiaionioi
(as in Romans 16:25) through which the world has passed in history. Cf. James
Barr, Biblical Words For Time, p.138f.

6
The little document called Discourse to the Greeks and erroneously
ascribed to Justin Martyr shows that the Logos could be looked upon as an agency
of salvation. Here it takes on decidedly personal characteristics in that it
"has ceaseless care over us," and "makes mortals become immortal, human beings
gods" (5). See E. R. Goodenough, By Light, Light, p.300.

7
See under Sarx in TDNT VII, 128.

8
Helmut Koester’s groundbreaking search for Synoptic references in the writings
of the early Fathers, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern,
concludes that almost all such references come from a pre-Gospel layer of
tradition.

9
If Papias’ (now lost) Oracles of the Lord Interpreted had contained
quotations from such Gospels, later commentators, like Eusebius and Philip of
Side, would certainly have referred to them. Nor is it likely that if he had
full narrative Gospels of Jesus’ life Papias would have disparaged written works
and preferred oral traditions, as he is reported to have said. Papias tells, in
the fragments quoted by Eusebius, that his information about "Mark" came from
"the Presbyter", but whether this was also the case concerning "Matthew"
Eusebius is not clear, though it is likely. All Papias witnesses to (assuming we
can trust Eusebius) is that a couple of decades or so into the second century,
there were certain circulating collections of sayings and possibly anecdotes,
probably of a prophetic nature, one of them in Hebrew or Aramaic, which had
begun to be attributed to an historical Jesus and associated with the names of
early reputed followers of him.

10Midrash and Lection in Matthew, The Evangelist’s Calendar, Luke: A New
Paradigm [See the book review of John Shelby Spong's
Liberating the Gospels.]

11
See The Paraphrase of Shem and The Apocalypse of Adam (NHC VII,1
and V,5)

13
For example, C. K. Barrett, The Pastoral Epistles in the New English Bible,
p.86f; J. N. D. Kelly, A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, p.146f; J.
L. Houlden, The Pastoral Epistles, p.100f.

14Jesus and the Word, p.8

15What is Redaction Criticism? p.23f

16
The 4th century "Ambrosiaster" gives us a clue in his commentary on Romans, that
the Christians of Rome accepted faith in Christ "without seeing any of the
apostles". In other words, it was a case of local development of belief in the
widespread idea of a spiritual Son, and nothing to do with a missionary movement
out of Judea.

17
Chapter Two, p. 31-45 [See the book review of Robert Funk's
Honest to Jesus.]

18Who Wrote the New Testament? p.75f; cf. his A Myth of Innocence,
p.101f.

19
Galatians 1:16-2:1.

20
Mack: Who Wrote the New Testament?, p. 80f; Funk: Honest to Jesus,
p.43.

21
NEB translation; literally, all this is from God.

22
We have to keep in mind that it matters not whether such sayings were actually
authentic. If Jesus was known to be a teacher, the competitive and disputatious
nature of the movement itself would have led to attaching anything and
everything to him for authority.

23
Perhaps no attempt to explain this is as mind-boggling as that of Sophie Laws in
her study The Epistle of James (p.34): "Whereas the Gospels have one form
of adoption of Jesus’ teaching, in that they identify it as his, James provides
evidence of another way of retaining and preserving it: absorbed without
differentiation into the general stock of ethical material." What are we to call
this: "preservation by burial"?! James has covered over the traces so well one
wonders how later generations were able to unearth it. Laws’ bland statement
that "It is not important to James to indicate where his precepts derive from
Jesus," explains nothing and only highlights the sheer absurdity of the idea.
Laws is in good company with such as Peter H. Davids (James, p.16), who
boldly states: "The non-citation of Jesus even when dependent on his thought, is
fully characteristic of the New Testament epistles." Davids draws on other
silences to prove that the silence in James is not a silence at all!

24
Verse 17’s "of Christ" is an objective genitive, supported by the entire
context. See C. K. Barrett’s attempt (TheEpistletotheRomans, p.189) to introduce a preaching Jesus
alongside the apostolic preachers into a little relative pronoun in verse 14.
Hou ouk ekousan, he says,should be translated as meaning "Christ
must be heard either in his own person, or in the person of his preachers."
Barrett’s claim, which no one to my knowledge agrees with, destroys Paul’s
finely-created chain of argument. Barrett is letting what he cannot believe is
missing override what is clearly there—or not there—in Paul’s words.

25New International Greek Testament Commentary:Hebrews, p.500

26
Hebrews 10:37 makes it clear that "the coming one" has not come previously, for
scripture’s promise has not yet been fulfilled. And 8:4 virtually spells out
that Christ had never been on earth. (Ellingworth, op.cit., p.405, shies away
from this conclusion by rejecting the normal interpretation of the imperfect
verbs, since "it could be misunderstood as meaning that Jesus had never been to
earth"!) As for 9:28, which scholars are willing to say is the only spot in the
New Testament epistles where the Parousia is spoken of as a second
coming, the "ek deuterou" can instead be taken as meaning "next" in a
sequential sense, and not necessarily "a second time"; in fact, the context of
v.27-28 supports the former. [See Supplementary Article No. 9:
The Son in the Epistle to the Hebrews.]

27
Since the higher realm of spirit constituted the "true" reality, that upper
world contained the spiritual counterparts of things material in the world
below. Thus within the spirit realm Christ could take on the equivalent of
"flesh", make a "blood" sacrifice, even be "of David’s stock" as in Romans 1:3.
Note that this feature of Christ "kata sarka" is determined by scripture,
as Paul tells us in verse 2. It is on the prophets, not known historical fact,
that Paul has founded his "gospel of the Son", and his activities in both
"flesh" and "spirit". [See Supplementary Article No. 8:
Christ as "Man".]

28
It has been remarked (e.g., by E. P. Sanders in his Jesus and Judaism)
that Jesus’ teaching, especially that considered most probably authentic by
modern scholarship, was hardly of a nature to prompt the authorities to execute
him. Sanders, too, points out that such teaching did not have a Jewish focus,
much less an apocalyptic one; neither did it call for the repentance or
restoration of Israel. This fundamental incompatibility between the "teaching"
side of the Gospel story and the "Passion" side is strong evidence that the one
originally had nothing to do with the other, but were brought together
artificially.

29
As in John Kloppenborg’s The Formation of Q.

30 Burton
Mack and John Dominic Crossan are prominently associated with this view of a
"Cynic" Jesus.

31
There are those who claim that the Synoptic Gospels do not specifically state
that Jesus is divine, though the picture painted of his "suffering, death and
resurrection" certainly leans in a cultic direction.

32
Mack locates the Markan community in Sidon or Tyre; others in southern Syria.
Willi Marxsen liked Galilee itself. Virtually every commentator regards the Q
community as native to Galilee.